Global Chief Marketing Officer Study highlighted several significant challenges faced by marketers today. Among them are understanding and delivering value to empowered customers and creating lasting relationships with those customers. To succeed in meeting these challenges, it is imperative for retailers to look closely at the customer experience. How do customers define value? How can we earn their trust? When evaluating a retailer’s ability to deliver value and build lasting relationships in a retail environment, there is always one glaring place to look: the checkout queue. A critical juncture where customers and sales are won or lost. Often the last impression made before a customer walks out the door. And often the first thing remembered when considering a return visit. The checkout line is a place where retailers stand to shine…or decline.
The Value of Queuing Technology
Queuing technology presents these opportunities and more:
1. Eliminate the Wait
Across industries, businesses are choosing to address the tension around waiting lines by getting rid of them altogether. Virtual queuing technology lets customer wait without waiting in line, resulting in a better customer experience.
2. Fix Problems in Real Time
Queue management technology enables retailers to monitor and study the changing variables of a checkout line in real time, from hour to hour, day to day, customer to customer. Getting straight facts about the ebbs and flows of a line, rather than making guesses about its progress and patterns, empowers retailers to create a consistent checkout experience with shorter waits and transaction times. And, ultimately, this creates happier, more satisfied customers.
3. Be Mobile-Ready
Electronic queuing with text alerts lets customers check in and then continue to shop, run errands, or do whatever they need to do while they await a text to let them know it's almost their turn for service. Two-way text messaging, in turn, allows customers to remain in control of their experience by re-queuing themselves if they need more time.
4. Drive Impulse Sales
Today’s queuing technology integrates powerful media messaging (entertaining or informative video, for example) to engage the customer in the queue. This approach can lead to as much as a 400 percent increase in impulse sales at checkout. Plus, perceived wait time can drop by up to 35 percent, as customers are engaged in the messaging and distracted by the time spent waiting.
5. Support the Omni-Channel Approach
Just as retailers are using omni-channel technology to create a better customer experience, in the checkout queue, we find technologies that can facilitate better service efficiency and higher quality service, without adding ongoing exponential costs. Recognizing customers are empowered and in control, retailers must find ways to turn a common source of tension (the waiting line) into an experience that will deliver value and build trust. Queuing technology can provide the answers. Let us help you plan your approach. Request a consultation.
